"Some years ago I met a Muslim girl who was interested
in Christianity," he (Daniel B. Wallace) said. "She came to me with six
handwritten, single-spaced pages of supposed discrepancies in the Gospels. She
had been taught by Muslims that if you can find one error in the Gospels, then
you can't believe anything they say. She said to me, `You're going to have to
answer every single one of these before I can believe anything about
Christianity.' My response was, `Don't you think this list proves that the
writers didn't conspire and collude when they wrote their Gospels?' She said,
`I've never thought of it that way.'
"I said, `What you need to do is look at the places
where the Gospels do not disagree at all. And what do you find? You find a core
message that is revolutionary: Jesus was confessed as the Messiah by his
disciples, he performed miracles and healed people, he forgave sins, he
prophesied his own death and resurrection, he died on a Roman cross, and he was
raised bodily from the dead.
"`So now, what are you going to do with Jesus? Even if
the Gospel writers have differences in their accounts-whether we should really
call them discrepancies is a topic for later-then this only adds to their
credibility by showing they weren't huddled together in a corner cooking all of
this up. Doesn't their agreement on an absolute core of central beliefs suggest
that they got the basics right, precisely because they were reporting on the
same events?"'
"What happened to her?" I asked.
"Two weeks later, she became a Christian, and now
she's a student at Dallas Seminary."
Strobel, Lee. The Case for the Real Jesus.
Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007, p. 79.
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